A Day of Redemption
April 18, 2025 (Good Friday) • Terre Haute South Community Service
Did you ever have a nickname? Maybe you have one now. Sometimes nicknames become so synonymous with a person that their real name is forgotten. I remember going to visit a man from my congregation in the hospital and when I walked up to the desk they asked me his name. Well, his name is Bud. Except his name wasn’t Bud. That was his nickname and hospitals don’t register you under your nickname. And I had no idea what his real name was so they did not let me in to visit him. By the way, I found out later his name was Raymond. But no one ever called him that—except maybe his doctors. To everyone else he was Bud.
Jesus had many “nicknames,” though I don’t know that people called him by those names when he walked on the earth. But we read about them in the Bible. Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” Son of Man, his favorite name for himself. And John gives him several nicknames in Revelation: First and Last, Holy and True, the Amen. Then there’s the one Isaiah the prophet gave him centuries before his birth: Man of Sorrows, someone who, Isaiah said, would be “familiar with pain” (53:3). The old hymn put it this way: “Man of sorrows, what a name, for the Son of God who came, ruined sinners to reclaim, Hallelujah! What a savior!” What a savior, what a name, indeed. For ourselves, we prefer “blessed and highly favored” or “man [or woman] of good reputation.” But Jesus was known as the “man of sorrows.”
In these verses from Isaiah that we read a moment ago, though, the prophet goes on to tell us why Jesus would be known by that nickname. It’s because we gave him that name. Well, not directly I suppose, but by what we did. The man of sorrows, Isaiah says, suffers from a sickness but it’s not his. It’s ours (cf. Oswalt, OneBook: The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 40-55, pg. 155). It’s our pain, our suffering, our transgressions, our iniquities, our wandering astray. Bluntly put, it’s our sin. It’s all that we have done to break our relationship with God. It’s all that we have done that has broken relationships among each other. It’s all the atrocities, the horrors, the unbelievable things we do to each other. Every time we lie, cheat, steal and scheme. Every time we have offended God by telling him to stay in his place. Every time we harm our fellow human being. All of these things break his heart and make him the man of sorrows.
So if we have done all these things and he hasn’t done any of them, why is he the one who is sick and we are not? Why is he the man of sorrows rather than you and I? It’s because of this day, when Jesus chose to do for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves. We needed help. We needed saving. We needed redemption, and so, as Isaiah predicted centuries before, Jesus went to the cross and offered himself to bridge the brokenness between ourselves and the Father. Jesus, the servant in Isaiah, had no need to make amends for anything; he had lived a life of complete dedication to the Father (cf. Goldingay, Isaiah for Everyone, pg. 205). But the people he lives among and the people he loves do need to repair the gap. And so he offers himself. He takes on our pain (cf. Oswalt 155). He bears our suffering. He is crushed for our iniquities and he is pierced because of our transgressions. And then Isaiah says the most miraculous thing ever: “By his wounds we are healed” (53:5).
It’s an impossible idea. How could one man’s death two thousand years ago make any difference in my life today? How does his being crushed make possible the redemption of billions of people all throughout history? Surely such a feat would require a much larger sacrifice, something bigger than one man’s death. And yet, there never has been any correlation between the size of a sacrifice and its effectiveness. That’s never been the point. And Jesus, the man of sorrows, unlike any other sacrifice in all of history, chose to give his life. “No one takes [my life] from me,” Jesus said, “but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18). He chose the crushing. He chose the piercing. He chose it all so that we could be redeemed (cf. Goldingay 206). He went through all of it so that we could be healed. We turned our backs on him and he redeemed us. Has there ever been a love like this? “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). And though we rejected him and continue to do so, he still chose, then and now, to call us friends and to give his life for our healing.
Today is indeed a day of purpose and a day of destiny. It is a day of horror and infamy. But above all, it is a day of redemption. Man of sorrows, what a name. But—Hallelujah, what a savior! Amen.
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